Tag: Karl Rove

Civil War: Trump attacks Republican strategist Rove, who fires back

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WASHINGTON – Former President Donald Trump intensified his war with the Republican establishment on Thursday by attacking Karl Rove, a longtime Republican strategist who criticized Trump’s first speech since leaving office for being long on grievances but short on vision.

“He’s a pompous fool with bad advice and always has an agenda,” Trump complained in a statement issued by his office in Palm Beach, Florida.

Rove, the architect of Republican George W. Bush’s presidential victories in 2000 and 2004, wrote in an opinion article in the Wall Street Journal on Thursday that Trump’s speech last Sunday to the Conservative Political Action Conference was wanting. Continue reading.

Karl Rove Goes Off on Trump’s ‘Unseemly’ Georgia Phone Call: ‘It Boggles My Mind’

“The president has been ill-served in this whole process.”

Fox News contributor Karl Rove joined other Republicans on Monday in openly criticizing President Donald Trump’s “unseemly” call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in which he urged the Republican official to “find” 11,780 more votes in his favor to flip the state from President-elect Joe Biden.

In a potentially legally perilous call over the weekend, the president spent an hour attempting to shake down Raffensperger while parroting unhinged conspiracy theories about widespread voter fraud. A recording of the call, which featured the Georgia secretary of state repeatedly debunking Trump’s false claims and rebuffing his requests to overturn the election, was later leaked to TheWashington Post.

During Monday’s broadcast of Fox News panel show Outnumbered, Rove—who has been criticalof Trump’s efforts to overthrow Biden’s victory—was asked by lead anchor Harris Faulkner to respond to the “shock over one Republican recording that” call. Continue reading.

Karl Rove gives Trump the bitter truth: You ‘certainly’ lost

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President Donald Trump is still refusing to concede to President-elect Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election, and many of his sycophants have been joining him in making baseless claims that the election was stolen from him because of rampant voter fraud — never mind the fact that the New York Times contacted election officials in all 50 states and found no evidence of the type of widespread fraud that Trump is alleging. But veteran Republican strategist Karl Rove gives Trump and his supporters a dose of reality in a Wall Street Journal op-ed published on November 11, stressing that Biden will become president whether Trump’s allies like it or not.

Rove notes that although the 2020 election was not the across-the-board blue tsunami that some pundits were predicting, one major Democratic victory was undeniable: Biden won.

He tried to couch the point in a an argument about Democrats underperforming, but the message was clear. Continue reading.

‘This isn’t going to happen’: Top GOP operative throws cold water on Trump’s claims of ‘voter fraud’

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As President Donald Trump and his allies desperately try to push the narrative that the election that’s slipping away from him is actually being stolen via voter fraud, a longstanding top operative in the Republican Party threw cold water on the suggestion.

Karl Rove, the former adviser to George W. Bush, wrote a blog post on Thursday describing the state of the race. His overall analysis seemed to generally match the consensus view of election analysts at the time — votes in key swing states remain outstanding, but results look increasingly favorable for Joe Biden — though he didn’t explicitly lay out that Trump is on a track to lose. He even put a negative spin on his analysis for Biden, arguing that his campaign did nothing to lift up down-ballot Democrats.

But in one notable paragraph, he sharply broke with the president and his allies who are concocting baseless claims about voter fraud to cast doubt on the results and drum up legal challenges to the process. Continue reading.